ROBERT WALSER

“With
all my ideas and follies I could one day found a corporate company for the
propagation of beautiful but unreliable imaginings.”

- Robert Walser

“Walser’s fictions are charged
with compassion: awareness of the creatureliness of life, of the fellowship of
sadness. He is a truly wonderful, heartbreaking writer.”

- Susan Sontag

One of the most remarkable and truly singular
artists of the twentieth century, Robert Walser (1878-1956) has had a huge
influence on a long list of literary, artistic and philosophical figures from
Franz Kafka to Walter Benjamin and Herman Hesse, from W.G. Sebald to J.M.
Coetzee; inspiring musicians such as Heinz Holliger, contemporary visual
artists like Fischli & Weiss, Tacita Dean and Billy Childish, and
filmmakers, like Percy Adlon and the Brothers Quay.

“A clairvoyant of the small.”- W.G. Sebald
Walser worked as a bank clerk, a butler in a castle, and an inventor's
assistant, producing nine novels and more than a thousand stories. In 1929 he
checked himself in to the asylum at Waldau, where he was diagnosed with
schizophrenia. He remained in mental health institutions for nearly thirty
years until his sudden death in 1956, whilst walking in field of snow near the
asylum.

“A bewitched genius”- Newsweek

Translated into English comparatively recently,
international interest in Walser's work has generated a wealth of new writing,
artwork and critical discussion which continues to explore Walser’s unusual
legacy. That his writing appears to exist between disciplines is due to his
wholly idiosyncratic use of language; it could be argued that the work sits
somewhere between Erik Satie, Franz Kafka and the paintings of Paul Klee.